My Journey with SQL Server….!

AG Readonlyrouting

Howdy folks! So, I was installing SQL Server 2017 on my new Cluster lab setup and found something interesting with SSMS 17.4 when creating AG. Before going there, let me show you guys what has been changed with SQL 2017 setup.

Note: This is not a step by step setup walk through.

As you can see there is no option to install SSMS/SSRS from original SQL media.

Well, so I downloaded the latest and greatest version of SSMS as of today(which is V17.4).

Note:On my server, SQL DB Engine installation was completed in 3 minutes, where as it took about 17 minutes to Install SSMS!!

Well, now I was all set to create an Availability Group(from SSMS) and found something interesting in the wizard(It has a Read-Only Routing tab 🙂 ). Not sure when this was introduced, but initial releases of SSMS 2017 didn’t had this IIRC.

If you are curious, Prefer secondaries is the default backup setting.

So, below is the screenshot of how it looks like if we navigate to ROR tab. We can setup load balancing as well right here from this wizard which is an awesome addition IMHO.

We are not going to create routing lists here in this blog post, I will show you how to do that using GUI in one of my future posts.